What is problem management?
Also called: ITIL problem management
Last updated
Problem management is the IT service management process that finds the underlying causes of incidents and removes them, or reduces their impact, so the incidents stop happening. It records each problem, investigates its root cause, documents known errors and their workarounds, and tracks the permanent fix through to closure.
In more detail
Problem management can be reactive, starting from one major incident or a pattern of smaller ones, or proactive, looking for weaknesses before they cause incidents. Either way, the steps are similar: log the problem, prioritise it, investigate the cause, record a known error with any workaround, and raise the change that fixes it.
The known error record matters even before the fix: it lets the service desk resolve repeat incidents quickly with the workaround, instead of investigating from scratch each time.
Example
Over a month, the service desk logs eleven incidents of users locked out after password changes. Problem management finds that a mobile email app keeps retrying the old password, records a known error with the workaround, and raises a change to update the app’s configuration.
Problem management in CheckFlow
In CheckFlow a problem record can run as a checklist: the related incidents, the root cause analysis and the known error recorded in fields, with the fix raised as a change checklist through a Linked Checklist field and follow-up actions as tasks attached to the checklist.
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